Is your community age-friendly?

Aging population focus of research

By Michelle Osmond

According to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the
population of this province is aging fast. Over the last 30 years,
it has aged faster than any other province in the country and
according to Statistics Canada, it will have the largest percentage
of seniors by 2026.

In 2003, the province revealed Our Blueprint for the Future and, in
it, health aging is a priority. The Healthy Aging Policy Framework
is meant to prepare the province to respond to the needs of
seniors. Part of this framework is the Age-Friendly Newfoundland
and Labrador Grant program which gives money to communities and
organizations to form committees and evaluate their
age-friendliness.

Recently, the provincial government held an Age-Friendly
Newfoundland and Labrador Communities Forum, which was attended by
grant recipients. Dr. Wendy Young was also invited as the lead
researcher with Memorial’s Age-Friendly Communities Research
Team. Their goal is to look at differences in age-friendliness and
over time, examine whether communities become more age-friendly and
if people are healthier because of this.

Dr. Young is Memorial’s Canada Research Chair in Healthy
Aging and an assistant professor with the School of Nursing. She
says this invitation was a very important milestone for the team
and will help them a great deal with their community connections
that are vital to their age-friendly research.

“Logically, if you live in an age friendly community, you
have access to healthier food, more programs and therefore less
chronic illness,” she said. “You need the methods to
measure whether it’s working and we have the skills to
collect data and analyze that data.

“Our team is very interested in reaching out to communities.
We want to be seen as a resource and because much of this work has
only been done with large cities, we can offer a lot.”

As a research team that’s part of an international movement,
the Memorial team received a $20,000 Healthy Aging Research Program
seed grant and they’ve leveraged this, in partnership with
researchers from British Columbia, to apply for a $2 million grant
to find out what tools are being used worldwide to assess
age-friendliness. “We’d like to do comparisons with BC
and other provinces, as well as Ireland. There are also
opportunities to collaborate with countries such as China and India
which have age-friendliness programs in place.”

The Memorial team is made up of Drs. Young, Catherine Donovan,
Veeresh Gadag, Sandra MacDonald, Nigel Simms, and Nigel Waters from
George Mason University in the U.S. They are already collaborating
with communities throughout the province such as Grand
Falls-Windsor, St. John’s, and the town of St. Lawrence where
Mayor Wayde Rowsell recognizes what an important resource the team
will be. “I’m very much looking forward to our
collaboration on this. I know it’s going to be about taking
down fences and creating a friendlier neighbourhood. With partners
such as Memorial we believe this will be a success story for all
citizens.”